Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), ranking Republican on the House global warming committee, has sent a letter to Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, calling for scientists whose names appear in the e-mails stolen from the U.K. Climatic Research Unit to be blacklisted from participating as contributors or reviewers of the forthcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Sensenbrenner is engaged in an outrageous McCarthyist jihad against the climate science community, making it abundantly clear that this controversy is not really about stolen e-mails, which have been misused and misinterpreted. Rather it is part of an aggressive campaign by the global warming denial machine to bully and intimidate the science community. Sensenbrenner shows no real interest in meaningful dialogue, nor in an honest examination of climate science findings. Denialists are throwing up a smokescreen of propaganda in an attempt to legitimize their refusal to come to grips with scientific evidence on global climatic disruption and its implications. This is a power play. Climate Science Watch calls on the IPCC to rebuff this attack. We call on the Obama Administration and in particular the President’s science adviser John Holdren to fully support the U.S. climate science community in this matter. We call on Sensenbrenner’s colleagues in Congress to chastise him for this censorious anti-scientist behavior. And we call on members of the science community to understand what the denial machine is up to and not allow themselves to be divided by innuendo about and attacks on scientists who have been singled out as immediate targets of a larger predatory attack on the community as a whole. Seeking an IPCC purge is just the next step. This attack, using guilt-by-association and demagogy, will go as far as it can to delegitimize the entire climate science and assessment enterprise if it is not exposed and thwarted. (See Details for the Sensenbrenner letter and press release.)

Press release posted on the Republican Minority Web site of the House Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming:

December 8, 2009

Sensenbrenner Urges IPCC to Exclude Climategate Scientists
‘It is possible that they succeeded in undermining the entire process’

Washington, D.C.– Climate researchers who authored thousands of e-mails and documents that show an effort to mislead and suppress opposing research should not be allowed to continue work on the latest report of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rep. Sensenbrenner said in a letter to IPCC Chair Dr. Rajendra Pachauri.

“Their behavior has caused grave damage to the public trust in climate science in general, and to the IPCC in particular,” Sensenbrenner wrote.

The letter asks that none of the researchers involved in the controversial e-mails be allowed to participate as contributors, reviewers, or in any other capacity in the preparation of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. The release of these e-mails, dubbed “climategate” by some, showed a pattern where staff and associates of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. tried to prevent publication of opposition research, and in some cases, manipulate data to produce desired results. One e-mail described a “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperature data.

The letter cites an e-mail from Pennsylvania State University researcher Michael Mann that describes efforts to delegitimize a journal called “Climate Research” because it published contrarian scientific studies. “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal,” Mann wrote.

“The authors of the e-mails understand what you apparently do not: Control of peer-reviewed literature equates to control of the IPCC’s conclusions,” Sensenbrenner wrote to Pachauri. “These bad actors therefore limited the pool of peer-reviewed studies upon which the IPCC could rely and manipulated the results of other studies upon which it did rely. It is possible that they succeeded in undermining the entire process.”